Abstract
A pervasive application of gamification in many areas of everyday life has arguably yet to happen. For instance, despite much commercial interest in and a potentially huge market for successful gamification products in the areas of education and health, much of the excitement is still based on speculation, and reception in parts of the academic community remains sceptical. The chapter aims to collate observations from multiple empirical studies and meta-studies and collect and highlight issues that need to be resolved or mitigated for gamification to progress. Such issues include unclear definitions, a limitation on small sets of elements employed with unclear effects, unintentional side-effects of competition, a confusing variety of operationalizations, the erosion of intrinsic motivation through extrinsic incentives, a disconnect between theoretical understandings and practical realizations, a strong focus on a behaviorist paradigm, studies' mixed, partial, and inconclusive results, a lack of attention to moderating factors, and methodological limitations.
TopIntroduction
The idea to fit play with purposes beyond itself, to “leverage aspects of games to achieve something beyond playfulness” (Richter et al., 2015, p. 23), has been proposed and implemented many times, before and after the “digitalisation of society or the massive economic success of computer games” (Fuchs, 2014, p. 136)1, under a plethora of monikers. One of the recent, most prominent notions is gamification. Regardless of when and by whom the notion was first proposed (see, for instance, Hägglund, 2012, p. 8; Tulloch, 2014, p. 318; Yıldırım&Şen, 2019, p. 2), “only around the beginning” of the 2010s (Fuchs, 2014, p. 120) it “gained widespread usage” (Tulloch, 2014, p. 318), and “has become a favoured buzzword of marketers, online strategists, start-up gurus, venture capitalists and digital consultants” (ibid., p. 317). Gamification as a research field is variously seen to be in its “infancy” (Hung, 2017, p. 62; Koivisto&Hamari, 2019, p. 192), as an “emerging” (Sailer&Homner, 2020, p. 101) or “maturing” field (Nacke&Deterding, 2017; Rozman&Donath, 2019, p. 16), or even as a “science” (Landers et al., 2018) or “as a new educational theory” (Biro, 2014 in Dichev&Dicheva, 2017, p. 23).
A pervasive application of gamification in many areas of everyday life is arguably yet to happen. Despite much commercial interest in and a potentially huge market for successful gamification products, for instance, in the areas of education and health, much excitement is still based on speculation, and reception by “many games studies academics and game designers” remains sceptical (Tulloch, 2014, p. 317; see e.g. Fizek, 2014; Raczkowski, 2014; Sailer&Homner, 2020, p. 78). Although “results in general lean towards positive findings about the effectiveness of gamification”, Koivisto and Hamari (2019, p. 191) note that “the amount of mixed results is remarkable”. The idea and the practices of gamification have attracted and continue to attract a fair amount of criticism: “Ever since its advent[,] gamification has sparked controversy between game designers, user experience designers, game theorists and researchers in human-computer interaction” (Dichev&Dicheva, 2017, p. 2). Bai et al. (2020, p. 2) speculate that Bogost's (2011) well-known description of gamification as “marketing bullshit” “reflects many people's attitudes”; Yıldırımand and Şen (2019, p. 1; see ibid., p. 4) note that “[w]hether [educational] gamification is an organized structure that contributes to student achievement, a simple pontification process or total nonsense is a matter of debate”; and for Tulloch (2018), educational gamification is but “an enactment, and reinforcement tool of neoliberal and market logic” (Kalogiannakis et al., 2021, p. 23).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Motivation, Extrinsic: SDT divides motivation into two main types, extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is described as an action that is performed for the sake of achieving a consequential end state or to avoid an unwanted outcome, for example when a student does her homework to avoid punishment from her teacher or parents ( Ryan & Deci, 2000a , p. 60).
Moderating Factor: Variables in an evaluation that significantly affect the strength of the relationship of a predictor or independent variable with an outcome or dependent variable. Examples for moderating factors in the context of gamification include learner personalities and preferences, gaming experiences, and the educational content or domains.
Game Elements: Structures, objects, or activities taken to be characteristic of games; it is disputed in the discourse what such elements are, how they are defined, and if they exist.
Behaviourism: An educational theory that prioritizes facilitating observable, tangible outcomes over understanding internal, mental operations. It centrally uses conditioning (reward and punishment) to affect behaviour changes. Successful learning is seen as the exhibition of changed behaviour.
Motivation, Intrinsic: Intrinsic motivation is described as an action that is performed because of the enjoyment of itself, for example when a student does his homework because he considers it fun or interesting (ibid.). Intrinsic motivation refers to people's inherent desire to seek challenges, explore and learn ( Ryan & Deci, 2000b , p. 70).